"Leaves of Grass," already publish'd, is, in its intentions, the song
of a great composite _democratic individual_, male or female. And
following on and amplifying the same purpose, I suppose I have in my
mind to run through the chants of this volume, (if ever completed,)
the thread-voice, more or less audible, of an aggregated, inseparable,
unprecedented, vast, composite, electric _democratic nationality_.
Purposing, then, to still fill out, from time to time through years
to come, the following volume, (unless prevented,) I conclude this
preface to the first instalment of it, pencil'd in the open air, on
my fifty-third birth-day, by wafting to you, dear reader, whoever you
are, (from amid the fresh scent of the grass, the pleasant coolness
of the forenoon breeze, the lights and shades of tree-boughs silently
dappling and playing around me, and the notes of the cat-bird for
undertone and accompaniment,) my true good-will and love. W. W.
_Washington, D. C., May_ 31, 1872.
Note:
[32] The problems of the achievements of this crowning stage through
future first-class National Singers, Orators, Artists, and others--of
creating in literature an _imaginative_ New World, the correspondent
and counterpart of the current Scientific and Political New
Worlds,--and the perhaps distant, but still delightful prospect, (for
our children, if not in our own day,) of delivering America, and,
indeed, all Christian lands everywhere, from the thin moribund and
watery, but appallingly extensive nuisance of conventional poetry--by
putting something really alive and substantial in its place--I have
undertaken to grapple with, and argue, in the preceding "Democratic
Vistas.
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